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Philosophycal / Feel-oh-so-fickle

Utsav Chadha

Can we use art and technology to reinterpret the process of reading philosophy, and construct it into a conversational interactive experience?

https://www.utsav-chadha.com/thesis

Description

Philosophycal is a web and voice-based experimental project that can be used to translate lengthy works of philosophy into conversational experiences. Conceptually, it creates a real-time dialogue between philosophical books and a participant. Technically, the project uses existing corpuses of philosophy to conduct text analysis in order to simulate an interactive context-driven conversation.

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The Nude Museum

Oriana Neidecker

The Nude Museum is a series of curated interactive virtual reality exhibitions that showcase a private collection of nude photography in the desert, on mars, and in a gallery setting.

Description

The Nude Museum is an exploration into how we can view and engage with art that is not physically displayed. Whether it is art in a private collection or in a museum’s storage, the reality is that most art lives in boxes and in warehouses. Virtual reality provides an experience of viewing the art itself that lies somewhere between seeing it in person and seeing it as a jpeg on a 2D screen.

The Nude Museum is a prototype that is part tool/part art piece that places a curated exhibition of a private collection of nude photography in various environments in virtual reality. It adds an otherworldly layer where the photos are curated with their environment and the experience is interactive.

Approaching a photo triggers an audio story about the piece, by the artist, their gallerist or from someone knowledgeable about it. It emulates the feeling of hearing about a piece from somebody first hand. Its conversational tone creates an enhanced viewing experience that makes the art more accessible and allows the viewer to connect on a deeper level with the work through stories. It is informative and surreal.

You have the opportunity to get closer to the art and really study it in a way that isn’t possible in a real museum. There are three different exhibitions of the collection in The Nude Museum, one in the desert, one on Mars, and one in a traditional museum setting.

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Jamais Vu

Danni Huang

Jamais Vu is a serial virtual reality experience consisting of repetitive loops, inspired some of my own recurring dreams.<br />

dannnni.com

Description

Jamais Vu is an experimental virtual reality meditation. It consists of repetitive loops that are inspired by dreams. Drawing on the surrealist approach, it aims to provide a rich metaphorical representation of our unconscious by transporting the looping feeling so common in our dreams into the waking world.

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Mtindo

Koji Kanao

'Mtindo' is a style transfer application for the desktop that offers non-technical people a unique opportunity to experience machine learning in action that explores some of the practical potentials of style transfer, beyond the game-like applications that are currently available. 'Mtindo' means style in Swahili<br /><br /><br />
I've often wondered what a self-portrait drawn by Van Gogh in the style of Picasso might look like and how I'd feel about it. Obviously, this never happened because Van Gogh died in 1890 when Picasso was just nine years old so we will never know for sure. Van Gogh never had a chance to see Picasso's art. Today, however, with texture synthesis techniques developed by Gatys et al. we have the potential to come close to simulating this possibility. We can combine an image created in one style with an image created in a different style to generate a new image with the content of the first image, but the style of the second. In this way, with style-transfer techniques, we can make a self-portrait painted by Van Gogh, Picasso-ish.

https://mtindo.ml

Description

What kinds of practical style transfer applications can be developed for non-technical people, such as creative professionals, that are easy to use, efficient, and push beyond the limits of what is currently possible with existing graphics tools? People think that machine learning requires a Ph.D./CS degree and a background in mathematics and statistics. It all sounds very complicated and difficult.

Unfortunately, machine learning isn’t easy to learn, but using applications designed with non-technical people in mind isn’t so hard and can be a lot of fun. Style transfer, which is the technique of recomposing images in the style of other images, is one form of machine learning that has started to be made available online to the general public through simple games.

Mtindo is a style transfer application for the desktop that offers non-technical people a unique opportunity to experience machine learning in action that explores some of the practical potentials of style transfer, beyond the game-like applications that are currently available. Mtindo means style in Swahili.

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Breathe With Me

Samantha Schulman

Breathe With Me is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety.

https://www.samanthaschulman.com/2018/04/17/breathe-with-me/

Description

Anxiety disorders affect more than 40 million Americans, many of whom suffer from panic attacks. Panic attacks are unpredictable, debilitating episodes typically characterized by shaking, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, and intense fear. The combination of fear and physiological symptoms continues to heighten one another, escalating the panic attack. Paralyzed with fear, one’s breathing becomes short and shallow. While some strategies for coping with anxiety involve meditation or medication, I want to offer a new solution, one that transforms the anti-anxiety techniques of both diaphragmatic breathing and applied deep body pressure into a garment that could be worn anywhere.

The result, Breathe With Me, is is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety. The user squeezes a hand-pump to inflate two air pockets that hug their chest and back, providing comfort in the application of gentle pressure. The hand-pump itself is soft and tactile, shaped to match the form of a person’s hand, and absorbs muscle tension to provide stress relief. The repeated squeezing of the pump combined with the soft compression develops a pattern that simulates deep breathing, guiding the user to practice breathing together with their garment. Essential oils are also dispersed with each pump as an additional calming element.

Furthermore, in creating Breathe with Me, I challenged myself to try to uphold environmental ethics when selecting materials, despite the lack of resources available for fast and affordable sustainable production. My final prototype is made with soft white cotton fabric by the way of vintage laundry bags, and silicone, which is non-toxic throughout its entire lifecycle when properly developed.

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Let Me Give Light

Yunho Choi

How can light and emerging technology create a more empathetic society?

Description

Let me give light is a series of augmented reality environments that repurposes ancient lighting technology in a modern context, inviting audiences to a meaningful and connected experience from their everyday life.

For the first part “Let me give light” is about giving light to our everyday light bulbs with meaningful interaction. The second part “Let us give light” invites users to an interactive light playground which aims the sense of enlightenment as well as deeper emotional connection.

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NYC Beats

Rushali Paratey

A web art experiment for New York’s iconic subway musicians and their underground audiences, nycbeats.xyz explores how to connect these artists in real time to engage their spectators via crowdsourced location information populated on a 3-dimensional map.

www.nycbeats.xyz

Description

New York City – has an amalgam of influences from all over the world which reflects in the city’s ever vibrant street music culture. A custom so strong that it extends into the transportation system – the century old subway of the city. Subway music is unpredictable, chaotic, rebellious and these tunes reverberating underground have an ecosystem that has flourished over the years. Protected by the 1st amendment yet outlawed based on decibel levels – whether it is a music student rehearsing or U2 in disguise, the subways have become a unifying stage for all. Observing this chaos led to NYC beats, an art experiment to gauge the patterns between commuters, musicians, music and locations. It is a WebGL map of NYC made with Mapbox and Three.js where one can navigate to find artists currently playing in the subways. Commuters can ‘spot’ musicians and musicians can ‘tag’ themselves on the map. MTA allocated locations are always “active” zones based on the Music under New York program's schedule.

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Runway

Cristobal Valenzuela

Constant increases in computer power and the proliferation and access to large databases have allowed machine learning to rapidly impact our society. While commercial applications can be found everywhere, experimentation of new prototypes and techniques remains – for the most- confined to computer scientists or engineers and has a limited reach to other fields. My thesis will try to explore who can a digital tool simplify the approachability and exploration of machine learning models in other disciplines. I will specifically focus my research on giving better access to state of the art machine intelligence techniques to artists and designers.<br /><br />
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Given this framework, I will like to explore questions like:<br /><br />
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– How can modern machine learning models be accessible for people outside of the realm of computer science?<br /><br />
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– Can we have machines and humans collaborate in a generative process using tools that simplify how the two work together?

https://runwayml.com/

Description

Building on previous and current work I have been developing at ITP, I will like to produce a system that allows artists and designers to experiment with state of the art ML models. My thesis project, called Runway, will be a tool that will take the form of a desktop application for all major operating systems; MacOs, Windows, and Linux. Wrapping typical and common practices when handling and using machine intelligence architectures. Input manipulation, process, modification, evaluating and outputting will be managed and automatized. This will enable the creators to focus on handling the model the right inputs and on using the outputs the model will produce in any given way.

Just as Computer Vision (CV), another branch of artificial intelligence, gain popularity among artists in the early 2000s with tools like OpenCV, ML has the opportunity to have a higher reach among artists due to its general set of applications in image processing, text analysis, and content generation.

One main feature of Runway will be that it will not be focused on data pre-processing, training, transfer learning, architecture optimizing or any other characteristic of creating custom and personalized machine learning models. Instead, it will be centered on using pre-trained, proven and working models that can output constant values for given inputs. For example, some of this models might include: image recognition, pose estimation, feature detection, image segmentation, text and sound generation and general classifiers.

I envision the working prototype as a GUI that is compromised of a series of variable options allowing artists and creators to experiment and explore ML models. As part of this process, I would like to create a series of collaboration with featured artists, whose practice has not been influenced by this technology, and have them propose and execute small works with Runway.

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Manifest Energy

Jasmine Soltani

A series of artifacts that explore the limitations and opportunities for ecologically sustainable computing, with a focus on the energy consumed in the production of our digital devices.

http://www.jasminesoltani.com/energy

Description

The lifecycle of a product includes the mining and processing of natural resources, manufacturing, transport, product delivery, use, and its reuse, recycling or disposal. Embodied energy is the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with production: the life-cycle up until the use phase. Manifest Energy is a series of lenticular stickers, a mechanical animation, and website that illustrate the life-cycle and embodied energy of digital devices.

Electronics are unique in that they have exceedingly high embodied energy, exacerbated by planned obsolescence, their difficulty to repair, lack of supply chain accountability, and the increasing ubiquity of computing. The energy economy, on which the ecologically destructive digital economy is based, is unsustainable in itself. Can illuminating the resource demand of our digital devices change our consumption habits, our relationship with our devices, the way we design and legislate their use, and handle end-of-life?

In addition to shifting the paradigm by which we think about energy consumption, I hope my project informs people of actions that can be taken. By extending the lives of our products through repair, we can reduce demand for new items. By developing more modular electronics, we can make these devices easier to repair. By putting pressure on companies and legislators, we can achieve greater supply chain transparency and improve the health of people working on or near production sites. By developing renewable energy sources and eliminating carbon emissions, we can mitigate the ecological impact of the production of digital technologies.

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Open Kinetics: Move, Play, Lean

Nathaniel Padgett

Open Kinetics are low cost kits that inspire learners of all ages to explore programming and electronics through movement-based play. The aim of Open Kinetics is to create an affordable, accessible, engaging platform that teachers can easily bring into their classrooms to foster technological agency in their students.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/journal2018/stefani/author/ngp249/

Description

An exciting aspect of the rapid proliferation of technology over the past decade is that much of it is open and remixable by anyone with access to a computer and the internet. This has created unprecedented opportunities for anyone to contribute to and use these technologies for research, to start businesses, or to make art.

But despite these advances, access to technology is still largely concentrated in the wealthiest communities. A major reason for this digital divide is cost. Open Kinetics addresses this problem with engaging DIY technology kits designed to be affordable and accessible. Students learn programming, electronics, and design by making a simple motion controller used to play free movement-based games that they can also remix and build themselves. Through building these kits, they learn to use technology for their own creative ends, developing technological agency and preparing them for careers of the future.

By pairing hardware with games, Open Kinetics kits give context to what students can do once they have built their controller. Open Kinetics give students a virtually endless array of experiences to choose from, whether moving a character, playing virtual tennis, or making kinetic art. Because these games are movement-based, they engage students in active, physical participation that facilitates learning. Built for kids ages 8-16 but great for all ages, Open Kinetics turn players into makers and empowers students to contribute to rather than simply consume technology.

One simple project for Open Kinetics is a twist on the Atari classic Pong. In this game has players move paddles up and down the screen to deflect a puck and prevent their opponent from scoring. Rather than using joysticks or buttons, players use the Open Kinetics motion controller they build to move the paddles with their arm movements, making a sedentary game into an active one.

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